A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating

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Emily Wilson PhD

A friend of mine served as the go-between to try to facilitate an introduction with this month’s guest. I did not do a good enough job explaining my reasons for wanting to interview her, so I can understand his confusion. After all, the guest I was after is a professor of classics who recently published a gorgeous translation of the Iliad. Not exactly a straight-line from that to an interview on the editorial page of an orthopaedic surgery journal.

“Not sure what topics Seth has in mind,” he wrote to her. “The tendon of Achilles, perhaps?”

My dream guest passed on the opportunity.

Damn. Damn. Damn. I really wanted this one. I named our family four-legged friend Argos, after Odysseus’s dog. An earlier book written by my dream guest is the best translation of the Odyssey that I've ever read. The writing is so alive that you feel like you're there, and the translator's insights about people (as expressed by her word choices and imagery) are so deep that it has a place on my special shelf of books that have changed my thinking. Undeterred—well, perhaps slightly deterred but not yet defeated—I opened up my email and tried again.

“It is not my intention here to turn you into Penelope, nor to act like one of the suitors,” I wrote to her. “I think (hope) you might enjoy what I’m proposing here.” I made my best case for why what she does and what she knows are, in fact, deeply relevant to readers of this journal. Please, pretty please…

To my great delight, and to the benefit of all of us, she agreed.

Meet Emily Wilson PhD, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Here’s reason number one why what she does and what she knows matters to you: She’s a good listener. She has to be, in order to translate, interpret, and share ancient texts in a way that gives them immediacy and real-world relevance as effectively as she does.

And good data suggest that we need to get better at listening. A recent study found that clinicians interrupted their patients just 11 seconds into the average interview [10]. This is even worse than we did nearly 40 years ago when this topic first was explored: In that one, physicians interrupted their patients 18 seconds into those so-called conversations [1]. Seems we’re not just poor listeners, we’re slow learners. As the best communicator I know in our specialty has suggested, patients don’t care what we know until they know that we care [8]. And the best way to convey that care, as we’ve seen in this section of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® before, is to cultivate our listening skills [6], particularly when we’re listening to people with whom we disagree or even find disagreeable [5].

Professor Wilson is beyond accomplished. She received a MacArthur Fellowship (sometimes called a “Genius Grant”) [9], she was the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English [4], and she may have been the only classicist to get interviewed [2] by Esquire magazine (OK, I’m speculating there).

But what strikes me most about Professor Wilson is not what she’s done, but how she does it. It’s the empathy that comes through in her translations. Each time I read her work, I enjoy a good story compellingly brought to life. Each time, she teaches me something I didn’t know about myself, and for at least a few moments, the path to living well seems slightly better lit.

What strikes me second-most is how beautiful her work is. I don’t see her as a translator so much as a storyteller, interpreter, and poet. As poets do, she chooses her words with great intention, posing burning questions about power, gender, love, and understanding among people. The urgency conveyed in her word choices help us interrogate those 2700-year-old characters so as to live better in the here and now.

All good, but probably not sufficient to justify an interview in a surgical journal (or for her to take the time to grant one).

What made Professor Wilson a “must get” for us here at CORR is her ability to listen, hear, and communicate. To make ancient works like the Iliad and the Odyssey relevant to us, she needs to listen attentively to Homer’s words, to have a synoptic grasp of his milieu, and to hear the voices of the characters themselves. She then needs to sing out so clearly and beautifully that we have to stop what we are doing and tune in.

Someone who can listen, hear, and communicate at this level is, without doubt, someone we, as surgeons and healers, need to visit with.

Let’s have that visit. Join me in a conversation with Professor Wilson. You’ll be glad you did.

Seth S. Leopold MD: Your work pays keen attention to differences in how people say things. Your Hector “sounds” different from your Achilles in your new translation of the Iliad [3]. That’s not the case in other translations I’ve read. What helps you do that? And, as importantly, how can we use your approaches to get better at “close listening” when visiting with people we care about or care for?

Professor Emily Wilson PhD: First, thank you so much for inviting me to do this conversation, and for the very kind words about my work. I’ve done other interviews in a range of different media outlets, but this is definitely not a typical venue or readership for me!

The distinctness of voice in Homeric characters was a feature of the original that I worked very hard to re-create in the translations. For a long time—at least since Richard Martin’s 1989 book, The Language of Heroes [7]—Homeric scholars have recognized that Achilles and Hector sound very different from one another, and yet, as you say, most translations don’t seem to convey that vividness of individual characterization through voice, tone, idiom, and style. There’s deep and wide empathy in the Homeric poems for each of the characters, including the minor ones, and there’s extraordinary subtlety and narrative sophistication in the shifts of point of view, such that we’re led to understand the story from multiple different perspectives. Some elements of what I did to evoke those things in my Homeric translations may not “translate” very easily to the work of clinical orthopaedics. I spend a lot of time reading and rereading the original text out loud, looking up words in dictionaries, reading commentaries, writing drafts, reading those out loud, editing and tweaking and changing many details of language to make it sound “right,” whatever that means for a particular passage or a particular character. In a real-time conversation, you don’t have time to pause and consider every word for many hours. But even so, my translation practice does have some parallels with “close listening,” and here are some possible applicable lessons.

One is to be as patient as possible, within any necessary constraints. Don’t assume that your first interpretation, or first attempt at a solution, is the best and final one; you may need to test it—with follow-up questions, with pauses for thought—in ways that might parallel my process of research, rereading, and multiple drafts on the same piece of writing. Also, approach every interaction reminding yourself that each person you talk to is a unique individual. Previous translators may not have consciously meant to make Hector and Achilles sound the same as one another, but it seems at least possible that many of my predecessors didn’t explicitly remind themselves to be looking out for differences of voice and characterization and perspective, and the result can be mushing all the characters into one (or, for your audience, assuming different patients are more similar than they really are).

Dr. Leopold: Conversely, small differences in the way that physicians say things can translate into big differences in patients’ experiences. Your language choices are not just beautiful, they’re precise and effective. (If this were a humanities journal, I’d give example after example, but to choose just one, your Penelope in the Odyssey completely changed that character for me). What have you learned from your work that might help surgeons like me, who want to communicate more effectively with our patients?

Professor Wilson: Thank you! Within the practice of translation, perhaps especially re-translation of ancient texts, I think translators sometimes believe the largest part of their work lies in understanding the original text on a semantic, dictionary level. They may spend much less time thinking about how to shape the text they’re creating—the translation—so that it conveys not only the semantic meanings of each word, but also the whole feel, sound, and experience, which includes elements like pacing and clarity (when the original is clear, as the Homeric poems generally are).

Maybe part of the lesson for surgeons is to make a practice of thinking consciously not only about your surgical practice and your medical recommendations, but also about your own communications with patients. Remember that there are always alternative words and phrases that could convey a similar message, but may have entirely different connotations and emotional effects. Those choices really matter, because patients make life and death decisions based on how they feel and on how clearly, or not clearly, they understand the available choices.

Dr. Leopold: So many of the stories you’ve translated are put in motion by the characters’ overwhelming emotions. If it weren’t for Agamemnon’s pride or Achilles’s anger, the Iliad would’ve been a much shorter book. Stated otherwise, our emotions, when not managed skillfully, can cause harms far beyond our immediate circle. When I’m in a room with a patient who’s had a complication or when I’m in an operating room where one is happening, the emotions are big: fear, shame, anger, others. How has your exposure to this set of issues as experienced by the characters you bring to life changed how you relate to your “big emotions,” and how should I do differently in this regard, so as to live more skillfully?

Professor Wilson: Yes, the Homeric poems, especially the Iliad, are full of big emotions. I’ve also worked a lot on ancient Stoicism—the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical movement where one of the central tenets is that many “big” emotions are based on false beliefs. A Stoic would say, if you’re afraid because your patient might die in surgery, or you’re ashamed because you may have made a mistake in the operating room, or you’re angry because you think a colleague made a mistake—all of those emotions are based on the false beliefs that death, pain, or the judgments of other people are things that really matter. The only thing that really matters, according to them, is whether you yourself are living as a virtuous person, living in accordance with Nature, Fate, and God. Stoicism had an important influence on modern cognitive therapy, which also invites us to manage our emotions by managing our perceptions.

But Homer offers a rather different model for how emotional management might work. It’s not about the individual philosopher, wise man, or successfully treated patient learning to change her or his individual emotions and beliefs, but about how emotions can be both stirred up and changed by people’s interactions with one another. Achilles’ wrath is more consequential than normal human anger. Human warriors usually kill one another by direct physical action. But in his fury at Agamemnon, Achilles removes himself from the battlefield, and thus indirectly causes the deaths of enormous numbers of his comrades without even being present at their deaths. When Achilles returns to battle to avenge the death of Patroclus, again, his rage goes beyond normal bounds. He kills suppliants, tries to fight against the river and the gods, and refuses to stop even when his enemy is dead. The poem traces how this huge rage of Achilles can come back to something on a human scale through his eventual willingness to participate in community rituals with other people: the funeral for Patroclus, the games in the dead man’s honor, and even the final meeting with his enemy, the Trojan king Priam, when Achilles grieves, weeps, and eats with somebody else.

I'm not certain, but I think this might suggest that it’s important, both for frightened or angry patients and for frightened or stressed doctors, to have a sense that they (or we) are not alone with our feelings, that there are possibilities for sharing them. Feelings get overwhelmingly big when people feel overwhelmingly alone. The sense of togetherness doesn’t always have to be through words—rituals and physical gestures can be even more powerful in some contexts.

And the final thing I’d offer is that in Book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles’ old tutor, Phoenix, tells the story of how overwhelming rage or delusion, “big” feelings, can overwhelm a person (as they do for Meleager, and for Achillles). But following the damage caused by those powerful feelings are the Prayers, the humble goddesses figured as poor, wrinkled old women, who can heal the damage by acknowledging mistakes and repairing the relationships that can be damaged when people are swept up by fury, shame, fear, or other big feelings.

Agamemnon’s attempts to make it up to Achilles, by publicly giving back both Briseis and extra treasure, are a way of drawing on the Prayers and trying to repair a broken relationship. This is also an important lesson for pretty much any workplace, including yours: You can’t expect people to be perfect Stoics, with no big emotions and no hurt or hurtful behaviors. But it is possible to make room for healing, humility, apologies, acknowledgment, and reparation.

Dr. Leopold: Back to language, for just a moment. We used to have “translators” in clinic to help us communicate with patients whose languages we don’t speak; they’re now called “language interpreters.” On the spine of your books, though, it says “Translated by Emily Wilson.” To me, though, your task is so much more than translating—you interpret history, life, power, gender, culture, and so much more (yes, including language) in your renderings of epics like the Odyssey and the Iliad. If anyone is a “language interpreter” rather than a “translator,” it’s you. Am I making too much of this?

Professor Wilson: I tend to think “interpreters” are different, in that they translate spoken language in real time, whereas I get many hours and years to produce my written translations. Their job is much harder than mine! I would also think that language interpreters also need deep understanding and cultural sensitivity about the patients whose words they are re-creating in English. It’s never just language. There are particular challenges in working as the voice for a patient who doesn’t speak English, which involve straddling cultural differences as well as words. There are different but related challenges in creating a poetic narrative text that evokes the whole experience of a poem from almost 3000 years ago, from a culture that is very distant from our own—and yet can sing to us.

Dr. Leopold: Read superficially, the Iliad is a bloody war story (maybe the bloodiest book I’ve ever read, and as a Cormac McCarthy fan, that’s saying something), and the Odyssey is the story of a so-called hero who is a liar, an adulterer, and a commander who came home alive, to wealth and fame, after all his men died. What do you see as the main reasons we should engage with them today, some 2700 years after they were created? What values do those ancient epics express that should matter to physicians today, or that can help us as healers?

Professor Wilson: Yes, the Iliad is extremely violent, and yes, none of the characters in Homer—certainly including Odysseus and Achilles—are unambiguously “heroes” in a modern sense: being admirable characters on a quest to save lives or save the world. That’s not the ancient sense of a “hero,” which is an ancient Greek word that suggests a mythical, perhaps semidivine character, but doesn’t suggest “good guy.” Some of the lessons overlap with what we’ve talked about already. The experience of reading or listening to a big, complex, morally ambiguous, emotionally intense narrative from a very alien ancient culture is a training exercise in patience and empathy: The texts teach or train you to listen and stay with a world that may not be immediately comfortable, and to understand that human possibilities and experiences may be broader than the present moment. Also, both poems tell stories about an individual who is separated from his community and finds a way back into it. One possible lesson is that human community is essential for all mortals, even the most exceptional heroes or surgeons. I’ve talked about community and emotion in the Iliad, and I’ll add that the Odyssey provides an extensive reflection on the need to form bonds both with those outside your immediate circle (through xenia, the relationships of guests and hosts) and with those in your household, through homecoming (nostos). Both poems repeatedly show us individual warriors charging out alone on dangerous missions—which often turn out to be both glorious and disastrous, for the individual and those who depend on him.

Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, and Odysseus are all, directly or indirectly, the cause of vast numbers of deaths not only of their enemies, but also of their own comrades and dependents, and in many cases, the deaths are associated with the leader’s desire for his own glory and reputation. Surgeons could take that as a lesson in the dangers of ego, and the importance of reflection, consultation, and checking your checklist before you rush into a procedure.

A final possible lesson is the Iliad is, as you say, extremely bloody, and the poem repeatedly reminds us of how fragile the mortal human body is, in that almost every possible body part can be inflicted with a deadly wound. But the violence is offset, or maybe made even more heart-breaking, by the fact that we are constantly reminded that every person killed on the battlefield has a name, a homeland, and parents who love him, and who will be devastated with grief at his death, so far from home. For a surgeon, that could be a reminder that every body part under your scalpel always belongs to a person who has a home and a family; someone who matters. Homer teaches us empathy.